Notes on Poet- Write 4 things you learned about the poet
Won Nobel Prize for Literature in 1922
Studied Painting for 3 years
Interested in Irish politics and Nationalism, Studied the supernatural
Founded The Irish National Theater
Summary of Poem
This poem is about the fairies wanting to take the little boy back with them.
The draw back is he will have to give up his family and friends.
Mood - mysterious, suspenseful
Tone - anticipation
Poetic Device
Imagery - the red stolen chairs, the bubbles,
Personification - the kettle signing, weeping of the fern, wondering water, fish have unquiet dreams, world is full of troubles and can't sleep
Title of Poem "Reapers" page 826
Poet Jean Toomer
4 Things you know about the author Multicultural background
Wrote a book - Cane
Headmaster of a school
|| || Reapers || || || || || ||
Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones -
Are sharpening scythes.
I see them place the hones
In their hip-pockets as a thing that's done,
And start their silent swinging, one by one.
Black horses drive a mower through the weeds,
And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds,
His belly close to ground. I see the blade,
Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade. Jean Toomer Reapers (men) are brining in the harvest
Born in Germany, emigrated to Palestine to the area that was going to become Israel.
Writes in Hebrew
A soldier in the Israeli Defense forces
Poem - "A Pace Like That"
I'm looking at the lemon tree I planted.
A year ago. I'd need a different pace, a slower one,
to observe the growth of its branches, its leaves as they open.
I want a pace like that.
Not like reading a newspaper
but the way a child learns to read,
or the way you quietly decipher the inscription
on an ancient tombstone.
And what a Torah scroll takes an entire year to do
as it rolls its way from Genesis to the death of Moses,
I do each day in haste
or in sleepless nights, rolling over from side to side.
The longer you live, the more people there are
who comment on your actions. Like a worker
in a manhole: at the opening above him
people stand around giving free advice
and yelling instructions, - Simile
but he's all alone down there in his depths.
Summary - Life is too fast and he wants to live life at a slower pace. He wants to enjoy life
Poetic Devices - Simile
Yehuda Amichai is one of the leading literary figures In Israel and a poet of international reputation. Since 1955 he has published eleven volumes of poetry in Hebrew, two novels, and a book of short stories. His work has been translated into thirty-three languages. He lives In Jerusalem.
Metaphor
Eve Merriam
from A skyful of poems
Morning is
a new sheet of paper
for you to write on.
Whatever you want to say,
all day,
until night
folds it up
and files it away.
The bright words and the dark words
are gone
until dawn
and a new day
to write on.
Eve Merriam
4 things about the author - Born in Philadelphia. Calls Poetry the most immediate and richest form of communication
Summary -
Poetic devices
"Right Hand"
Philip Fried - Founder of the Manhattan Review, an internationl Poetry journal, plus two collections of poetry. Collaborated with his wife, photographer Lynn Saville, on Acquainted with the night.
Summary
Poetice Devices 4/25/07 Fear - Gabriela Mistral p 88
The Street - Octavio Paz p 89
Conscientious Objector - Edna St. Vincent Millay p 244
Tone - serious,
Images - horse and rider in barn
allusions and figurative language
The Bean Eaters - Gwendolyn Brooks
Notes on Poet -
Summary - Tone - Serious, Plain everyday ordinary people who have lived there lives but keep going anyway, remebering their lives
Poetic Device -
Poetry Log - Notes on Poet - Summary of Poem - Poetic Devices -
Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Robert Frost
1. What is the rhyme scheme of this poem?
2. What characteristics does the poet give to desire and to hate?
3. Is the title appropriate for this poem? Why/why not?
4. What is the tone of this poem? Do you think that the poet mean the literal destruction of the world?
5. What does the word “suffice” mean in the last sentence?
Africa my Africa
Africa of pround warriors in ancestral savannahs
Africa of whom my grandmlother sings
On the banks of the distant river
I have never known you
But your blood flows in my viens
Your beautiful black blood that irrigates the fields
The blood of your sweat
The sweat of your work
The work of your slavery
Africa, tell me Africa
Is this your back that is bent
This back that makes under the weight of humilation
This back trembling with red scars
And saying yes to the whip under the midday sun
But a grave voice answer me
Impetuous child that tree young and strong
That tree over there
Splendidly alone amidst white and faded flowers
That is your Africa springing up anew
springing up patiently obstinately
Whose fruit bit by bit acquire
The bitter taste of liberty.
The Fish 5/2/07
The Fish
I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled and barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
--the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly--
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
--It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
--if you could call it a lip
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels--until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.
Elizabeth Bishop
The Weary Blues Langston Hughes (1923)
1 Droning a drowsysyncopated tune,
2 Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
3 I heard a Negro play.
4 Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
5 By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
6 He did a lazy sway ....
7 He did a lazy sway ....
8 To the tune o' those Weary Blues.
9 With his ebony hands on each ivory key
10 He made that poor piano moan with melody.
11 O Blues!
12 Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
13 He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
14 Sweet Blues!
15 Coming from a black man's soul.
16 O Blues!
17 In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
18 I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan--
19 "Ain't got nobody in all this world,
20 Ain't got nobody but ma self.
21 I's gwine to quit ma frownin'
22 And put ma troubles on the shelf."
23 Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
24 He played a few chords then he sang some more--
25 "I got the Weary Blues
26 And I can't be satisfied.
27 Got the Weary Blues
28 And can't be satisfied--
29 I ain't happy no mo'
30 And I wish that I had died."
31 And far into the night he crooned that tune.
32 The stars went out and so did the moon.
33 The singer stopped playing and went to bed
34 While the Weary Blues ech
For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.
"How do you know if you are going to die?"
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
"When you can no longer make a fist."
Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.
oed through his head.
35 He slept like a rock or a man that's dead.
Auto Wreck" by Karl Shapiro: Poetry Analysis Summary: Poetry analysis of "Auto Wreck" by Karl Shapiro.
Title and author: "Auto Wreck" by Karl Shapiro
Topic: The presence of the automobile in the modern world.
Theme: People are oddly fascinated with auto wrecks.
Mood: gloomy
Poetic Devices (word selection and order):
A. rhyme: little, hospital
B. alliteration: soft, silver; bell, beating; bell, breaking; down, dark; light, like; dips, down; tight, tourniquets; sickly, smiles; stubborn, saw
C. consonance: mangled, lifted; little, hospital
D. assonance: bell, beating; dark, flare; light, like; top, floating; bell, breaking; doors, closed; hangs, lanterns; touching, wound; unspoken, innocent
E. parallelism: "And down the dark...", "And brakes speed...", "And stowed into...", "And the ambulance..."; "One is still...", "One with a bucket...", "One hangs..."; "Our throats were tight...", "Our feet were bound..."; "And cancer...", "And spatters..."; "Who shall die"", "Who is innocent""
F. repetition: "beating, beating"; "floating down", "dips down"; "rocking, slightly rocking"
G. meter: none
H. number of stanzas: 4
6. Poetic devices (effects and images):
A. imagery: "Pulsing out red light like an artery"; "One with a bucket douches ponds of blood"; "simple as a flower, blooms"; " stretchers are laid out the mangled lifted"
B. personification: none
C. metaphor: none
D. simile: "red light like an artery"
E. onomatopoeia: "silver bell beating, beating"
F. hyperbole: none
G. understatement: none
H. oxymoron: "grim joke"
I. paradox: "grim joke"
J. irony: "grim joke"
7. My favorite line: "One with a bucket douches ponds of blood." I know this line is grim, but it is my favorite line because it is so powerful.
Poetry Reading Log
Title "The Stolen Child" page 815
Poet William Butler Yeats
Notes on Poet - Write 4 things you learned about the poet
Won Nobel Prize for Literature in 1922Studied Painting for 3 years
Interested in Irish politics and Nationalism, Studied the supernatural
Founded The Irish National Theater
Summary of Poem
This poem is about the fairies wanting to take the little boy back with them.The draw back is he will have to give up his family and friends.
Mood - mysterious, suspenseful
Tone - anticipation
Poetic Device
Imagery - the red stolen chairs, the bubbles,Personification - the kettle signing, weeping of the fern, wondering water, fish have unquiet dreams, world is full of troubles and can't sleep
Title of Poem "Reapers" page 826
Poet Jean Toomer
4 Things you know about the author Multicultural background
Wrote a book - Cane
Headmaster of a school
|| || Reapers || || || || || ||
Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones -
Are sharpening scythes.
I see them place the hones
In their hip-pockets as a thing that's done,
And start their silent swinging, one by one.
Black horses drive a mower through the weeds,
And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds,
His belly close to ground. I see the blade,
Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade. Jean Toomer Reapers (men) are brining in the harvest
Rhyme scheme aa-bb-cc-dd-ee
Rhyming couplets
Poetic devices - alliteration, assonance, consonance
Poet Yehuda Amichai
4 things about the poet
Born in Germany, emigrated to Palestine to the area that was going to become Israel.Writes in Hebrew
A soldier in the Israeli Defense forces
Poem - "A Pace Like That"
I'm looking at the lemon tree I planted.A year ago. I'd need a different pace, a slower one,
to observe the growth of its branches, its leaves as they open.
I want a pace like that.
Not like reading a newspaper
but the way a child learns to read,
or the way you quietly decipher the inscription
on an ancient tombstone.
And what a Torah scroll takes an entire year to do
as it rolls its way from Genesis to the death of Moses,
I do each day in haste
or in sleepless nights, rolling over from side to side.
The longer you live, the more people there are
who comment on your actions. Like a worker
in a manhole: at the opening above him
people stand around giving free advice
and yelling instructions, - Simile
but he's all alone down there in his depths.
Summary - Life is too fast and he wants to live life at a slower pace. He wants to enjoy life
Poetic Devices - Simile
Yehuda Amichai is one of the leading literary figures In Israel and a poet of international reputation. Since 1955 he has published eleven volumes of poetry in Hebrew, two novels, and a book of short stories. His work has been translated into thirty-three languages. He lives In Jerusalem.
Metaphor
Eve Merriam
from A skyful of poems
Morning is
a new sheet of paper
for you to write on.
Whatever you want to say,
all day,
until night
folds it up
and files it away.
The bright words and the dark words
are gone
until dawn
and a new day
to write on.
Eve Merriam
4 things about the author - Born in Philadelphia. Calls Poetry the most immediate and richest form of communication
Summary -
Poetic devices
"Right Hand"
Philip Fried - Founder of the Manhattan Review, an internationl Poetry journal, plus two collections of poetry. Collaborated with his wife, photographer Lynn Saville, on Acquainted with the night.
Summary
Poetice Devices
4/25/07
Fear - Gabriela Mistral p 88
The Street - Octavio Paz p 89
Conscientious Objector - Edna St. Vincent Millay p 244
Tone - serious,
Images - horse and rider in barn
allusions and figurative language
The Bean Eaters - Gwendolyn Brooks
Notes on Poet -
Summary - Tone - Serious, Plain everyday ordinary people who have lived there lives but keep going anyway, remebering their lives
Poetic Device -
Poetry Log -
Notes on Poet -
Summary of Poem -
Poetic Devices -
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Robert Frost
1. What is the rhyme scheme of this poem?
2. What characteristics does the poet give to desire and to hate?
3. Is the title appropriate for this poem? Why/why not?
4. What is the tone of this poem? Do you think that the poet mean the literal destruction of the world?
5. What does the word “suffice” mean in the last sentence?
Africa page 202
Links to background information
David Diop. (1927-1960
Poetry
AFRICA
David Diop
Africa my AfricaAfrica of pround warriors in ancestral savannahs
Africa of whom my grandmlother sings
On the banks of the distant river
I have never known you
But your blood flows in my viens
Your beautiful black blood that irrigates the fields
The blood of your sweat
The sweat of your work
The work of your slavery
Africa, tell me Africa
Is this your back that is bent
This back that makes under the weight of humilation
This back trembling with red scars
And saying yes to the whip under the midday sun
But a grave voice answer me
Impetuous child that tree young and strong
That tree over there
Splendidly alone amidst white and faded flowers
That is your Africa springing up anew
springing up patiently obstinately
Whose fruit bit by bit acquire
The bitter taste of liberty.
The Fish 5/2/07
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled and barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
--the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly--
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
--It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
--if you could call it a lip
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels--until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.
Elizabeth Bishop
The Weary Blues
Langston Hughes
(1923)
1 Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
2 Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
3 I heard a Negro play.
4 Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
5 By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
6 He did a lazy sway ....
7 He did a lazy sway ....
8 To the tune o' those Weary Blues.
9 With his ebony hands on each ivory key
10 He made that poor piano moan with melody.
11 O Blues!
12 Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
13 He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
14 Sweet Blues!
15 Coming from a black man's soul.
16 O Blues!
17 In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
18 I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan--
19 "Ain't got nobody in all this world,
20 Ain't got nobody but ma self.
21 I's gwine to quit ma frownin'
22 And put ma troubles on the shelf."
23 Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
24 He played a few chords then he sang some more--
25 "I got the Weary Blues
26 And I can't be satisfied.
27 Got the Weary Blues
28 And can't be satisfied--
29 I ain't happy no mo'
30 And I wish that I had died."
31 And far into the night he crooned that tune.
32 The stars went out and so did the moon.
33 The singer stopped playing and went to bed
34 While the Weary Blues ech
35 He slept like a rock or a man that's dead.
Auto Wreck" by Karl Shapiro: Poetry Analysis
Summary: Poetry analysis of "Auto Wreck" by Karl Shapiro.
- Title and author: "Auto Wreck" by Karl Shapiro
- Topic: The presence of the automobile in the modern world.
- Theme: People are oddly fascinated with auto wrecks.
- Mood: gloomy
- Poetic Devices (word selection and order):
A. rhyme: little, hospitalB. alliteration: soft, silver; bell, beating; bell, breaking; down, dark; light, like; dips, down; tight, tourniquets; sickly, smiles; stubborn, saw
C. consonance: mangled, lifted; little, hospital
D. assonance: bell, beating; dark, flare; light, like; top, floating; bell, breaking; doors, closed; hangs, lanterns; touching, wound; unspoken, innocent
E. parallelism: "And down the dark...", "And brakes speed...", "And stowed into...", "And the ambulance..."; "One is still...", "One with a bucket...", "One hangs..."; "Our throats were tight...", "Our feet were bound..."; "And cancer...", "And spatters..."; "Who shall die"", "Who is innocent""
F. repetition: "beating, beating"; "floating down", "dips down"; "rocking, slightly rocking"
G. meter: none
H. number of stanzas: 4
6.
A. imagery: "Pulsing out red light like an artery"; "One with a bucket douches ponds of blood"; "simple as a flower, blooms"; " stretchers are laid out the mangled lifted"
B. personification: none
C. metaphor: none
D. simile: "red light like an artery"
E. onomatopoeia: "silver bell beating, beating"
F. hyperbole: none
G. understatement: none
H. oxymoron: "grim joke"
I. paradox: "grim joke"
J. irony: "grim joke"
7. My favorite line: "One with a bucket douches ponds of blood." I know this line is grim, but it is my favorite line because it is so powerful.